Author Rick Van Noy took a canoe trip down the Delaware River into his past

The Delaware River bends slightly before it runs into Titusville, N.J., and reveals Rick Van Noy’s past: the white church steeple, boyhood boulders he swam between with friends, and the little schoolhouse where he’d sit and stare at the water outside the window.

Life pulled Van Noy away from the Mercer County waterfront, and he moved to Colorado, Washington, and Ohio for school and work. For the last 20 years, he has taught American literature at Radford University. In 2021, after a stroke and separation, Van Noy returned to his roots with his Wenonah canoe and his dog, Sully. Together they paddled some 200 miles south, from Hancock, N.Y., to Trenton, a journey chronicled in his new book, Borne by the River.

“This was always sort of home,” Van Noy said by the river on a recent weekday. “I always thought I would come back.”

Rivers, Van Noy writes in his book, have always inspired authors, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. They’re full of change, ever-moving, and evolving.

“Rivers carry people and goods but also meaning. And this one means something to me,” Van Noy wrote.

The Delaware, he noted, is a historical river and a founding one. It is the reason why cities like Philadelphia, Trenton, Wilmington, and even little hamlets, like Titusville, exist along its edges.

“There’s layers of history here and that’s important,” he said. “It contributes to a sense of place.”

Van Noy grew up blocks from where George Washington crossed the river to lead an attack on Hessians in Trenton.

The river Van Noy grew up on, north of Trenton, is also renowned for recreation: canoeing, tubing, and fishing. He spent his summers working for a local canoe rental. South of Trenton, the Delaware teems with cargo ships and powerboats.

The Delaware flows undammed for 330 miles from New York’s Catskills to the Atlantic Ocean. The river’s East Branch begins in an unremarkable pool, just up the road from a tire shop; the West Branch begins at a former family farm, 1,886 feet above sea level, and down a dead-end road in Schoharie County, N.Y. All told, the Delaware’s watershed encompasses 13,539 square miles of smaller rivers and tributaries that snake through the region.

Van Noy also teaches environmental humanities classes at Radford and authored the book, Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South. He said his interest in environmental issues goes hand-in-hand with his childhood on the Delaware.

“I’ve learned to love the environment by falling in love with the place and the river,” he said.

Van Noy said recent years have been good to the Delaware too. American shad, a once-ubiquitous fish, has returned, and in 2020, Americanrivers.org named the Delaware its “river of the year.”

“The river has come a long way,” the organization noted. “Seventy-five years ago, it was choked with pollution and sewage.”

Van Noy saw bald eagles and osprey on his journey, chatting up fishermen and revelers barbecuing and sipping whiskey along the banks. The following year, he canoed down the Delaware with members of the Lenape Nation.

The paddle toward Titusville flooded Van Noy’s memory with both the missing, like a rope swing, and things that still remain, like the home where he grew up.

“It has occurred to me that my search for sense of place, that most writing on sense of place, is motivated by loss, or learning to value what is before us, deepening our appreciation,” Van Noy wrote in his book.

Someday, Van Noy might return to New Jersey for good, back to his stately childhood home on the hill, by the river.

Van Noy’s book is available at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501775116/borne-by-the-river/.